The Army’s New State-of-the-Art $580 Million Handgun

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After almost 30 years of U.S. Army soldiers carrying the M9 Beretta as their sidearm, there’s a new handgun in town. The Beretta will be replaced by the Sig Sauer P320 at a cost of about $580 million. The top of the line weapons range in price from $762 to $830. But those are retail prices. Surely the army gets a substantial discount by ordering in bulk.

Like the Italian-owned Beretta, Sig Sauer is foreign-owned (controlled by the privately held German company L&O Holding). But like the Berettas produced for the Army, the Sig Sauers will be manufactured in America.

Ciro Scotti, a journalist, editor and media strategist, is a contributing editor to The Fiscal Times. Earlier, he was Deputy Editor, The Americas, at Reuters and Managing Editor at Bloomberg Businessweek.